From Twitter:
MT @jamesinealing: Thinking what use the new Google 'Search by Image'
feature has for museums, http://bit.ly/j5F4uZ
Mar
@MarDixon
www.mardixon.com
On 8 September 2011 21:17, Jeremy Ottevanger <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Have you heard of Europeana? Or the Collections Grid? If not, take a look.
> You'll find that collaboration between thousands of diverse cultural
> heritage institutions as well as aggregators, universities, big players like
> Wikipedia and Google, national and international government is alive and
> well and currently building an infrastructure (not simply a search portal)
> on which other stuff can then build. Hooking up to other broadly comparable
> initiatives (CAN, CHIN etc) and furthering integration with commercial
> search operators would be the obvious next step. To return to the start of
> the thread, standards play a necessary part in this but so do intelligent
> processing, analysis and semantic enrichment.
>
> Cheers, Jeremy
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 07 September 2011 23:16
> To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; Jeremy
> Ottevanger
> Subject: Re: [MCG] How about a Museums-only search engine?
>
> On 07/09/2011 15:38, Tim Trent wrote:
> > Assuming it to be desirable then one of two things has to happen, either
> is imponderable:
> >
> > 1) Every museum sets a yet to be defined meta tag on each page that says
> "Hey, I'm a museum, search me!"
> I was thinking more of a tighter, page-specific or "div"-specific tag
> saying "Hey, I'm an individual Museum Exhibit listing, search me!" ...
> but basically, yes.
>
> > 2) Every museum submits their xml sitemap (which many do not have) to a
> centrally administered function
> >
> > Each of those two solutions have to be indexed by something with grunt,
> bandwidth and serious storage.
> It'd only be serious grunt and bandwidth if it was popular. If it was
> popular, it'd maybe be worth supporting. If it wasn't popular, it might
> not be worth doing.
>
> As for storage, I'm not sure how many "museum exhibit" pages there are,
> outside monsters like the Smithsonian and the big national museums. If
> we're worried about storage requirements, the thing could be piloted for
> pooled searching across small museums only. If a "biggie" wanted to get
> involved, then maybe they could consider hosting it with their existing
> infrastructure. Maybe little museums could "friend" the Big Museum, and
> the Big Museum could then be in a position to apply for a Lottery grant
> for the project.
>
> Or a university IT department might decide that it's a good project to
> be involved with, because it'd give them a "small" search engine to play
> with, with a manageable dataset. It might be a nice testbed for trying
> out new search methods.
>
> Many things are possible, assuming that there's actually a reasonable
> demand for such a thing, which, as you point out, might not be the case.
>
>
> > Something has to pay for that. That sounds like option 1, Big G and
> advertising owned by them paying them, assuming you can present them with
> the business case and they accept it. And just who is going to add the meta
> tag? And how many are going to add it correctly? And what form should it
> take?
>
> Big G might be willing to do it for kicks, PR and goodwill (they
> already run things like Google Scholar). They could produce a "shiny"
> Google Museums widget, you add it to every exhibit page that you want
> indexed, job done. I imagine if someone organised a sit-down meet
> between a couple of Big Museums and Google they might be keen. But
> perhaps not all museums might want to get in bed with Google.
>
> A widget would probably be easiest for a small museum to implement,
> because it'd provide the tag and the "Search for more items like this"
> button in one place. But a "class" identifier embedded in another tag
> would be more powerful in that it'd explicitly tag a /section/ of page,
> without headers, footers, intros etc, and allow multiple exhibits on a
> single page to be indexed separately.
> If people wanted a system, if could start simple and evolve.
>
> > In option 2, who runs the central system? who pays?
> >
> > Are there more options than the 2?
> >
> > [Did you use "IT" and "marketing" in the same sentence just then? - Wow,
> brave!]
> >
> > I'm not even sure this is a "nice to have". What happens if you instruct
> a search engine to seek thus:
> >
> > "my search string" +museum
> >
> > Example:
> >
> >
> http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Nelson+%2BTrafalgar+%2BMuseum&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
> >
> > Surely that returns all that the search engine has found (and some guff
> besides)
>
> Yep, but there's still a fair amount of guff, and if we were only
> searching pages or page sections that were explicitly flagged as being
> about individual exhibits, almost all of that guff should disappear.
> You'd lose all the educational background pages, and the mentions of
> museums off Trafalgar Square near Nelson's Column, and hopefully end up
> just looking at a list of actual items.
>
> I did think of adding "site:museum" to the standard search string, which
> would supposedly only returns hits from domain names that include
> "museum" somewhere in the title, but although that seemed to work for
> ".com" museums, it didn't seem to include results for ".co.uk", and it
> wouldn't give the V&A or the National Gallery, which don't have "museum"
> in their domain names.
>
>
> /If/ this ability would be genuinely useful, the technical and funding
> issues wouldn't seem to be too difficult to overcome, and we could all
> get togther and start working out the details. If it wouldn't be
> genuinely useful, the other issues are probably irrelevant.
>
> Eric
>
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